I chat with a Conservative Jewish scholar.
LF: The answer to your essay is that O has no answer. Orthodoxy and modernity are not compatible, there can only be compromises. That is a good and bad things. There is much in modernity worth rejecting (at least for some of us). O is in much better shape than C.
CJ: I think that Orthodoxy’s answer, its best answer anyway, is the selective overcoming of modernity. To harmonize with modernity is to allow modernity to set the rules of the game. To reject modernity in toto is to reject history, which seems to me irresponsible–Hannah Arendt’s pariahdom. To overcome modernity in places, and to make a truce with it in others, seems both responsible and credible to me. My problem with Orthodox (as a merely quasi-Orthodox Jew) is that I think it often rejects modernity in the wrong places and then capitulates to it in the wrong places as well. The moral nobility of Orthodoxy inspires me. The intellectual rigidity of Orthodoxy (at least of what I see often in my shul) repels me. Example: last summer I took up the offer to study gemara with a serious baal tshuvah, a guy with a PhD. When we were learning, I questioned the gemara’s treatment of a non-Jew for a particular purpose. My partner was put off by my question and asked me what I was thinking. I mentioned Kant and the Kantian principle of treating others as ends, not means. He then told me that Kant was “a pygmy” and that we were studying the divine will and such trivial humanistic concerns had no place. I mentioned Isaac Breuer (grandson of Samson Raphael Hirsch), who was a profound student of Kant, and he looked at me with incomprehension and disgust. I did not go back to his home! We can do better than this.
LF: I want to believe what you are saying but I don’t think it works. Biblical Criticism and historical tools demolish the foundations of Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy can not accept HC and such historicism. BC (and any form of scholarship that challenges O’s credentials) can not be countenanced by O. O is strong in sticking by halacah and the notion of a God-given moral code which is demolished by BC. You can either be right (standing with scholarship) or you can be halachic.
The Exodus controversy was illustrative. Scholarship says it did not happen as the Bible describes. Orthodoxy has no response but the 13 principles et al. I saw James Kugel lecture to YICC, a modern Orthodox shul, that it should ignore HC. It would only interfere with their lives.
CJ: That would be a tragic outcome, and I reject a tragic view of life. I think that God wants us to be whole, although wholeness will always escape us. Nonetheless, we must strive for it. I can’t accept “compartmentalization,” as my late friend Charles Liebman called it, as the last word. Jon Levenson, by the way, would not agree with Jim Kugel and I wouldn’t think Levenson less “Orthodox.” So maybe the problem is with the doxa in Orthodoxy. Without falling into the soul deadening roboticism of what Heschel called “religious behaviorism” maybe what we should be about is orthopraxy, praxis rather than doxa. Menachem Kellner’s interesting work on dogma in the Middle Ages leads me in this direction.
I think that Jon Levenson has produced superb studies of biblical themes but he has not written his own biblical theology yet. Had he done so, he might be able to address the problem of how criticism and Torah-faith might hang together.
I once asked Mordechai Breuer, the son of Isaac Breuer and a great, Bar Ilan historian, how he reconciled being a historian with being an Orthodox Jew, implying that if he were to follow history across the board he would have to accept HC with the necessary consequences. He told me that “Man does not live by history alone.” I’m not sure that there is a better answer at present.
LF: When, as a journalist, I am writing about somebody who is a friend of mine, or is somebody that I can not write about dispassionately because I have obligations to that person, I try to always state my bias.
When scholars pretend to write dispassionately about things where they truly have no room to follow the truth (thinking about fundamentalists), then I do not respect them.
You are lucky. You can follow the truth wherever it leads. I respect those who lead closeted compartmentalized lives, as I do, but they should not speak out publicly where they privately believe and practice otherwise (generally speaking).
CJ: As to scholars, so many of them nowadays are under the sway of post-modernism that they mock the idea of objectivity or value-neutrality. They seem to have succumbed to the belief that all is politics and will to power, all is about persuasion rather than truth. I find this dismal. Liberals mock ideas such as liberty, and professors mock truth. We are indeed the barbarians that we fear.
Of course, it’s not quite so grim. There are plenty of scholars who still believe that truth is compelling and can be found, at least provisionally. The sciences are not as infected by moral and intellectual defeatism as the humanities. As to the compartmentalized, I have recognized for a long time that those of us who are philosophers–and who are temperamentally ill-suited to tolerate compartmentalization–are a peculiar minority.
There are highly observant men in my shul who have PhD’s in physics and chemistry, and who evidently sustain a pre-Copernican view of the universe in shul. That would drive me crazy, but is a perfectly tolerable way of life for them. Who am I to judge?
